Selections from Considerationson the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline
(1734)

“There are general causes, whether moral or physical, which act upon
every monarchy, which advance, maintain, or ruin it. All accidents are
subject to these causes. If the chance loss of a battle, that is, a
particular cause, ruins a state, there is a general cause that created
the situation whereby this state could perish by the loss of a single
battle. In a word, the principal trend carries along with it the outcome
of all particular accidents."

"The Romans arrived at their domination of other peoples, not only by
their command of the art of war, but also by their prudence, wisdom,
perseverance, by their love of glory and homeland (patrie). After
these virtues disappeared under the emperors, the art of war remained.
Because of it, the Romans, despite the weakness and tyranny of their
rulers, were able to keep what they had acquired earlier. But when
corruption made itself felt even in the army, Rome became the prey of
all other peoples."

“But underlying the unanimity of Asiatic despotism, that is, every
government where power is not checked, there is always a more serious
type of division. The tiller of the land, the soldier, the merchant, the
magistrate, the noble are related only in the sense that some of them
oppress the others without meeting any resistance. If this be union, it
can be so not in the sense that citizens are joined to one another, but
rather that sense in which corpses are united when buried in a mass
grave."

"It is true that a point was reached when the republic could no longer
be governed by the laws of Rome. But it has always been the case that
those good laws responsible for the expansion of a small republic, turn
out to be a burden since it has succeeded in expanding far beyond its
former bounds. This occurs because the nature of these original laws was
such as to produce a great people, rather than to govern it.”

Charles de Secondat, Baron de las Brede et de Montesquieu (1689–1755)

He is against monarchy. He believed in rule by an aristocracy. He had a
feudal conception of liberties inhering in parlements, in which
the people had virtual representation by the nobility of the robe and
the nobility of the sword. He thought England a model of good
government. Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers of this country
inferred from his writings that a federation of states could solve the
relative problems of bigness and smallness of territory, governed by the
state. The Roman republic of Antiquity was a model for the founding
fathers and Montesquieu. What he emphasized was that commercial society
and democratic forms coincide, thinking of England in particular.

He believed that natural law inhered in human nature and could be
scientifically demonstrated, even in the morals and customs of a people
as being of necessity and rational. Montesquieu argued against
Machiavelli. Force only delegitimizes power in the ruler. There should
be a separation of powers to prevent despotism.

History rules by its precedents in universal laws and particular
empirical manifestations. We are all citizens of the world, not just of
our resident nations. In the end, corruption destroys every res
publica, though degeneration through wise legislation can postpone
the inevitable decline. Patrie or love of the homeland leads to
pietism and good civic virtue to retard decline.

Bigness in government is an issue in that the conquest of territories
with allies leads to overextension beyond its economic means to support;
hence, empires bankrupt themselves.

History is that of the spirit of a people, not mere laws. History
nonetheless is universal because there are precepts of natural law that
are ethical, scientific and objective that cross cultural boundaries.
There are laws and customs relative to geography, time, ethnicity, et
cetera—but the laws of nature are general and bind nations together in
humanity. Natural law supersedes positivist or secular laws, in which
there is a synthesis of general and particular. This dialectic emerged
in Hegel’s writings.

The parlements were juridical in character and the offices served
the people. Religion is the binding force that brings people to
recognize a sovereign. His religiosity as a virtue is Deistic in nature.

In the Roman republic, mercenary armies led by ambitious generals
developed loyalty of their soldiers to themselves. The love of equality
led to Rome’s demise. Citizenship becomes a fiction when there were no
longer common mores. Assemblies became conspiracies in which there was
sedition and anarchy. He found divisiveness productive of civic virtue.
It had causation. In the end, Rome fell because of its excessive size.
The auxiliaries fighting for Rome turned against it.

Others learned the art of war that had been the exclusive virtue of
Rome. Rome co-opted territories and barbarian tribes who later evolved
because they mastered the martial arts and poverty motivated them to
excel. Hence, the form of government in Rome changed to dictators who
could not maintain the authority and legitimacy of the government.
Taxes, burgeoning as the state weakened, became intolerable to the
people.

Even chance is ruled by maxims found in a people’s virtues and oss
thereof. Group conflict had causation that undermined the public safety
and interests. The “general spirit” of the society underwent decay.

Montesquieu downplayed the role of heroes. Too, he detested balance of
power politics or Realpolitik.

He believed in a strong civil society, the rights to property, and
agroscience to maximize individual liberties.

In history he emphasized corruption, not the inevitability of progress
peculiar to Enlightenment reason.

Rome had a policy of divide and conquer, seize territories of neighbors;
practice deception in diplomacy by noble lies, use allies to fight and
pay tribute, and lastly master martial arts through science.

The two feuding factions were the patricians in the senate and the
plebeians with their tribunes; the latter called for meritocracy and
the recall from public service of the incompetent. The magistrates of
the plebeians turned on the patricians. The censors from the people
regulated the mores of society to create standards of public morality.
Too, plebeians and patricians defended traditions with their gods. The
plebeians curtailed the abuse of power by maintaining the spirit of the
people, the senate’s force, and the authority of the magistrates.

Montesquieu found his ultimate ideal modeled in the England of his time
in which checks and balances within governments corrected errors in
policy. Its unwritten constitution, the oldest in the world, balanced
conflicting interests in civil society to maintain the liberties of the
people and vigor of intellect, demonstrated in contemporary mastery of
the martial arts.

Natural law provided the standard of reason, while relative positive
laws had different manifestations across culture. He was free of racism.
Much was geographically determined insofar as he thought size dictated
the nature of government. The bigger the territory, the more absolutist
in character.

Montesquieu’s Political Philosophy in The Spirit of the Laws
(1748)

Religion, mores, and patriotism (patrie) form the trinity of
values inherent in a political culture that constitute its spirit (Geist).
When those values are absent, there is only fear, and Asiatic despotism
is the invariable result. Russia, China, Turkey, and Persia are his
primary examples.

He believed in direct democracy if democracy were possible in a
republican form. However, his decided class preference was for rule by
the excellent or aristocracy. He did concede that there could be a
confederation of republics that would result in a country of great
size—and democratic at that. That influenced the thinking of James
Madison when he wrote the Federalist Papers.

Montesquieu advocated natural laws as inherent in the state of nature.
Convenience for the sake of commercial life brought men together in
civil society and they then wrote a social contract. Men are amiable in
Montesquieu’s scheme of things. Positive law, historically circumscribed
in statutory law, gave the universality of natural law its particular
dimensions. There was always ambiguity in the struggle between natural
and positive law. For instance, natural law condemned slavery; positive
law institutionalized it. He could never resolve that dilemma.

The three forms of government, democracy (patrie—love of nation),
aristocracy (arête—excellence) and monarchy (virtu—heroism’),
formed the three normative states acceptable to Montesquieu—with their
underlying principles governing national behaviors; the opposite was
Asiatic despotism in the person of the tyrant, where fear and violence
ruled over a people in a vast land that was essentially ungovernable.

“Power must check power,” said Montesquieu, to stabilize and
institutionalize a rationally organized state. Madison said that
“Ambition must check ambition” in the Federalist Papers.
Montesquieu influenced the American Revolution with his ideas of the
separation of power and checks and balances in a mixed constitution
because he took his model from the King and Parliament in Great Britain.

Montesquieu admired the direct democracy of Athens more than the
representative democracy of England because of the massive corruption in
the latter’s government and electoral process.

The spirit of the laws is affected by climate, terrain, the general
spirit of the people (their virtus), mores (their internal belief
systems, attitudes, and values), and manners (externally manifested
civility in the public sphere). Each country is unique and that
determines their national psyche.

Montesquieu was a defender of the older military and legal nobility of
the French Parlement because he thought they best embodied excellence in
qualities of leadership. He defended this class against the monarchy and
its agents. There were intermediary bodies in France that he thought
were indispensable to political liberty: parlements in the provinces;
the nobility; local courts; the church; provincial government; towns;
guilds; and professional associations. They would balance one another
against possible oppression from the central government and its
administration to serve as a barrier against despotism. That political
tension defined the onset of the French Revolution, when Louis XVI
convened the ancien régime’s Parlement (to raise new taxes) that
had long been in disuse with its Estates General (the three orders of
clergy, nobility, and bourgeoisie). The Revolution started as a revolt
by the nobility against taxation and ended as a middle-class revolt
against the whole monarchical form of government, with the idea of
creating a universal man motivated by liberty, equality, and fraternity.
By the end of the nineteenth century, republican government prevailed (a
belated victory for the Jacobin radicals).